LIBER FORTUNAE
. An anonymous treatise on Fortune that its author claims to have composed in prison in
the year 1345. He seeks to reconcile the dilemma of Fortune and Divine Providence, by
making Fortuna the daughter of God. There follows a display of the banal knowledge a
typical cleric possessed, codified according to sins, vices, virtues, and so on. The author
knew the Roman de la Rose, Boethius’s De consolatione Philosophiae, the Disticha
Catonis, the Somme le roi of Laurent d’Orléans, the Elucidarius, and a goodly number of
proverbs. The author’s effort to sign his work with an acrostic is a failure. The text,
surviving in two manuscripts and a fragment, is some 4,000 rhymed octosyllables in
length and evinces both a mediocre style and a poverty of original thought. When the
author discovers that he has begun to repeat himself, he brings the poem to a close.
John L.Grigsby
Grigsby, John L., ed. The Middle French Liber Fortunae. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1967.
LIBER SANCTI JACOBI
. A compilation of five texts, with prefatory letter and addenda, devoted to the cult of the
Apostle James the Greater. The texts appear to have been independently composed and
then brought together at some time after 1137 and before 1173. The twelve extant
manuscript copies contain the compilation entirely or in an abridged version and range in
date from the 12th century through the 18th. The earliest manuscript, probably from the
early 1140s, is in the Cathedral Archives of Santiago de Compostela. It is uncertain
whether or not an earlier exemplar of the compilation existed, and it has not been possible
to establish the identity of the authors or compilers of the work.
The compilation was originally called the Codex Calixtinus after Pope Calixtus II (r.
1119–24), whose name appears as the author of the prefatory letter and other parts of the
texts. This attribution was rejected as early as the 16th century, however, and a more
accurate designation for the compilation would be the Pseudo-Calixtine Compilation.
The name Liber sancti Jacobi (Livre de saint Jacques, Book of St. James) was adopted by
the early 20th century, a choice suggested by the contents of the manuscript and the
incipits of Books 2, 3, and 5. The compilation has also been called Jacobus in current
literature, a name appearing in some of the manuscript copies.
The Compostela manuscript opens with the Pseudo-Calixtine prefatory letter and is
followed by Book 1, which contains the liturgy for the three main feasts of St. James with
accompanying monophonic music and notation. Book 2 recounts twenty-two miracles of
St. James dated from 1080 to 1135. Book 3 gives confusing versions of the arrival of the
relics of the saint in Spain. In Book 4 is found the legendary account of the campaigns
against the Saracens in Spain waged by the emperor Charlemagne (r. 780–814), which
includes the famous story of the ambush and death of Charlemagne’s nephew Roland.
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1028